Smallholders, Householders

This timely and convincing book challenges the myth that only modern, large-scale, mechanized, scientific agriculture can provide the food needed for the world's rapidly growing population. It is a detailed and innovative analysis of the agricultural efficiency and conservation of resources practiced around the world by smallholders - farmers who practice intensive, permanent, diversified agriculture on relatively small farms in areas of dense population.
Using dozens of ethnographic examples from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, the author demonstrates that there are significant, fundamental commonalities among smallholder cultures. He argues that smallholder farming, wherever it takes place, is a viable alternative to today's dominant ideal of industrial agriculture, with its dependence on fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.
The author critiques prevailing theories - neoclassical and socialist, Right and Left - of the evolution of agriculture and the political economy of "peasants" that consign smallholders to the status of inefficient and outmoded anachronisms with primitive technology, grueling labor, and poverty. He shows, among other things, that smallholders produce more per unit area than large farms in the same region, and that they do so with greater energy efficiency and less environmental degradation.
The family household is the major social unit of smallholders. It trains its members in agricultural tasks, coordinates their labor, regulates household consumption, produces a significant part of its own subsistence, and usually participates in the marketplace, where it sells its agricultural goods and the products of cottage industry. The household must make daily decisions in rational, utilitarian terms - allocating time, effort, tools, land, and capital to specific uses in a context of changing climate, resource availability, and markets.
Smallholder households have well defined, heritable property rights in their livestock and manured fields, gardens, and orchards. Though they reject schemes to organize production collectively, which would remove the incentives and security that come with private property, at the same time they vigorously protect open grazing land, forests, marshes, and irrigation systems through common property institutions that benefit all members of the community. The author predicts that wherever people are plentiful and land is scarce, the distinctive adaptation of the smallholder will persist and flourish.